HEROES: The Nightmare Fall

Lightning slashed the white peaks of the
boiling thunderclouds below as a pair of silver-and-orange F8U
Crusader jet fighters streaked smoothly down the Carolina coast on the
return leg of a high-altitude flight to Boston. Lieut. Colonel William
Henry Rankin, U.S.M.C., sitting under the curved glass canopy of the
lead jet, took his two-plane flight over an angry anvil of cloud, sat
back casually as his eye ran across the instrument panel. Altitude:
47,000 feet. True air speed: 500 knots. It was a crisp, sunlit flight,
and the only problem in sight was to bore down through the overcast to
the rain-browned runways of the Marine Auxiliary Air Station at
Beaufort, S.C., only minutes away.

But before muscular, 39-year-old Bill Rankin, combat pilot and a
bar-bellhefting, physical-culture fan, would touch earth again, he was
in for 40 minutes that even other old salts of the air would be talking
about for years.

At nine miles up, his engine quit with a grating, rasping jolt. Rankin
hopefully eyed the slumping panel needles, tried vainly to coax juice
from an emergency electrical generator to rouse his radio, kept his
aircraft from nosing over into supersonic speed. But only for an
instant; a hundred battle missions and a bail-out in enemy fire over
Korea had honed his survival instincts, and Rankin knew the choice.
To his wingman, Lieut. Herbert Nolan, he snapped a message over his
faltering transmitter: "Power failure. May have to eject." To himself
he said: "This is going to be a pretty high one."

The Good Chute. As the Crusader lost altitude and sank into the clouds,
.Rankin put his life in the hands of the ingenious engineers who had
sweated for years to anticipate his problem. He pulled two overhead
handles to trigger a fast sequence: 1) a canvas windscreen came down
over his face, 2) the plane's canopy blew off, 3) an explosive charge
sent seat and pilot into the thin, 65° air, and 4) in the air a cable
from the plane yanked the metal seat off his rump, left Marine Rankin
above 40,000 feet with his jet helmet, oxygen mask and his parachute,
preset to open automatically-at the safe-breathing level of 10,000
feet. "I had a terrible feeling like my abdomen was bloated twice its
size. My nose seemed to explode. For 30 seconds I thought the
decompression had me," recounts Rankin. "It was a shocking cold all
over. My ankles and wrists began to burn as though somebody had put Dry
Ice on my skin. My left hand went numb. I had lost that glove when I
went out.

"It seemed like I free-fell an eternity. All this time I had this keen
desire to pull the ripcord. I had to keep telling myself, 'If you do,
you'll slow down and freeze to death or die from lack of oxygen.' Just
as I was considering pulling the cord, I felt a shock. I looked up to
see the chute. All I could see was cloud. But I could tell from pulling
on the risers that I had a good chute.